10 Ways To BBQ On An Alien World

The Sun from the Internation Space Station

The Horsehead Nebula : Sculpted by stellar winds and radiation, a magnificent interstellar dust cloud by chance has assumed this recognizable shape. Fittingly named the Horsehead Nebula, it is some 1,500 light-years distant, embedded in the vast Orion cloud complex. About five light-years “tall”, the dark cloud is cataloged as Barnard 33 and is visible only because its obscuring dust is silhouetted against the glowing red emission nebula IC 434. Stars are forming within the dark cloud. Contrasting blue reflection nebula NGC 2023, surrounding a hot, young star, is at the lower left of the full image. The featured gorgeous color image combines both narrowband and broadband images recorded using several different telescopes. via NASA

A Giving Hand, vdB9 // DocRx

The Milky Way over Snow-Capped Himalayas

What if oxygen is poisonous and it just takes 75-100 years to kill us?

NGC 4590 (M68) Globular Cluster

33,000 light years from the Earth, this globular cluster has an odd orbit around our galaxy, orbiting like a comet does around a star, and moving away as far as 100,000 light years from the centre. 

It’s theorised that it’s likely a captured cluster, and appears to be undergoing core collapse, where the gravitational influence of the entire cluster bares down at the centre and causes black holes and dense stars to slowly migrate towards the centre, much as our own galaxy has the same mechanism creating the central black hole. 

Megalith Cist Burials Found in Southern India

Archaeologists have uncovered a total of 250 cairn circles in southern India’s trade and industrial center of Kodumanal, which was inhabited from the 400s through first century B.C.E.

The cairn circles were made of giant rocks, or megaliths. Most of the cairn circles were around rectangular chambers built of megaliths, which in turn contained burial cists and three or four bowls or pots. The pottery was likely for offerings placed outside the burial cists, showing a belief system that included something after death.

An impressive ten pots and bowls were recently unearthed in a larger circle made of boulders and rectangular-shaped cists made of stone slabs, surrounding a three-chambered burial. This larger, more complex burial might have been intended for someone important in the community.

cosiscience

Walking dinosaur, Columbus Interactive Science Museum

Helicoprion: What if, like, teeth,

Mesosaurus: Yeah?

Helicoprion: but WHEEL

Mesosaurus: No don't -

Helicoprion:

(Image by ДиБгд)

Say hello to globular cluster 47 Tucanae 👋

This glittery spray of ancient stars is about 16,700 light-years away from Earth toward the constellation Tucana. Globular clusters like this one are isolated star cities, home to hundreds of thousands of stars that are held together by their mutual gravity. And like the fast pace of cities, there’s plenty of action in these stellar metropolises. The stars are in constant motion, orbiting around the cluster’s center.

Past observations have shown that the heavyweight stars tend to crowd into the “downtown” core area, while lightweight stars reside in the less populated suburbs. But as heavyweight stars age, they rapidly lose mass, cool down and shut off their nuclear furnaces. After the purge, only the stars’ bright, superhot cores – called white dwarfs – remain. This weight loss program causes the now lighter-weight white dwarfs to be nudged out of the downtown area through gravitational interactions with heftier stars.

Until these Hubble observations, astronomers had never seen the dynamic conveyor belt in action. The Hubble results reveal young white dwarfs amid their leisurely 40-million-year exodus from the bustling center of the cluster.

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